placed Oliver for all future time as the greatest hero of the
Protestant movement. There are few examples in the history of
literature of so great and so sudden a triumph of truth and justice.
At the same time, it is well to remember that the _Cromwell_ is not a
literary masterpiece, in the sense of being an organic work of high
art. It is not the "Life" of Cromwell: it was not so designed, and was
never so worked out. It is his "Letters and Speeches," illustrated by
notes. A work so planned cannot possibly be a work of art, or a
perfect piece of biography. The constant passage from text to
commentary, from small print to large, from Oliver's Puritan
sermonising to Carlyle's Sartorian eccentricities, destroys the
artistic harmony of the book as an organic work of art. The "Life" of
Cromwell was in fact never written by Carlyle; and has yet to be
written. Never yet was such splendid material for a "Life" prepared by
a great historian.
_Sartor Resartus_ (1831), the earliest of his greater works, is
unquestionably the most original, the most characteristic, the deepest
and most lyrical of his productions. Here is the Sage of
Craigenputtock at his best, at his grimmest, and, we must add, in his
most incoherent mood. To make men think, to rouse men out of the
slough of the conventional, the sensual, the mechanical, to make men
feel, by sheer force of poetry, pathos, and humour, the religious
mystery of life and the "wretchlessness of unclean living"--(as our
Church article hath it)--nothing could be more trumpet-tongued than
_Sartor_. The Gospel according to Teufelsdroeckh is, however, a
somewhat Apocalyptic dispensation, and few there be who can "rehearse
the articles of his belief" with anything like precision. Another and
a more serious difficulty is this. How many a "general reader"
steadily reads through _Sartor_ from cover to cover? And of such, how
many entirely understand the inner Philosophy of Clothes, and follow
all the allusions, quips, and nicknames of Sartorian subjectivity. It
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